UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,

I'm new to UNIX and have the following question:

At work a Solaris Unix system is used. I'm not sure if they have gnu sed installed so I tried using the command "sed -r" and got the error:
"Illegal option --r"

Does this mean that gnu sed is definitely not installed on the system or could it be there somewhere but is not called by default?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

js

GNU stuff are not standard on commercial UNIX... except perhaps gzip...
All the rest depends on what the admins use... and usually the way of thinking is "stay the more standard as possible"...
Some admins (like me...) tend to if needed install GNU utilities just there where needed AND use a prefix where name exist already to avoid messing up the system so you would get a gfind, gawk etc... and preferably keeping them in /usr/local/bin
I would not install GNU utilities without using gcc so look if gcc is present to start with...

Thanks for the quick answer! I had a look in /usr/local/bin but there was no version of sed there.

There are sed programs in the folders usr/xpg4/bin, usr/ucb/. You wouldn't know off-hand if either of these are the gnu sed version?

What is it that you think sed can do than nawk cannot do ? If GNU is not available and if you desire, install it. Otherwise, the next best thing is nawk.

you could use "which" command to see if they are installed.

Code:

for i in `find / -name "*sed" ; do pkgchk -l -p $i|tail -3 ; done

Note that on Solaris, gnu sed is often called gsed (like gtar, ggrep, gmake, gawk and others) so the previously suggested commands looking for a file named "sed" will fail despite gnu sed being there.

Many gnu tools are bundled or installed from common repositories in Solaris. Usual locations would be /usr/sfw/bin, /opt/sfw/bin, /opt/csw/bin and /usr/local/bin.

Solaris 11 will likely have gsed in /usr/bin.